


things just won't do without you

by ninemoons42



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hospital, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Baking, Body Worship, Cassian works with at least two governments, Dress Up, Established Relationship, F/M, Family Feels, First Aid, Found Family, Heart Attacks, Honeymoon, I sneaked in a last-second cameo and I am proud, Inspired by Music, Jyn is a doctor who works with elderly patients, Living Together, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Medical Procedures, Multiple Languages, Poetry, Prompt Fic, Prompt Fill, RebelCaptain Appreciation Week, Rogue One - some of them live, Surgeons, Surgery, Tumblr Prompt, United Kingdom, Wedding Gifts, Wedding Rings, Weddings, background lyra/galen, background spiritassassin, heart surgery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-10
Updated: 2017-04-16
Packaged: 2018-10-17 04:35:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 11,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10586541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: How do you cope with the stresses and fraught emotions of your job?Sometimes, if you're lucky, you find people who care for you, and whom you care for just as much.(Or: gerontologist Dr Jyn Erso goes home to international researcher / analyst / government agency guy Cassian Andor, and they love each other madly.)





	1. day one: family

**Author's Note:**

> This is a story in seven parts, written for Rebelcaptain Appreciation Week (10-16 April 2017). Each chapter corresponds to one of the writing prompts for each day of the week:
> 
> Day One: Favorite Scene(s) || Writing Prompt: Family  
> Day Two: Song Day || Writing Prompt: Comfort  
> Day Three: Tropes || Writing Prompt: Undercover  
> Day Four: AU of your choice || Writing Prompt: Nerve  
> Day Five: Quote Day || Writing Prompt: Home  
> Day Six: Diego Luna and Felicity Jones Appreciation || Writing Prompt: Hope  
> Day Seven: Free day || Bonus prompt: Future
> 
> Title taken from the Foo Fighters, "Walking After You".
> 
> \--------
> 
> Rating has gone up after Chapter Four!

One foot in front of the other, she thinks, one foot in front of the other until she can’t go any further, and then she has to get past whatever it is that is standing in her way, and then rinse and repeat, like scrubbing her hands methodically and slowly and thoroughly and carefully, with the antiseptic burn of iodine handwashing liquid in her nose, staining her fingers dark reddish-brown: and somehow she’s made it out again, out into the world again.

She wants to look up at the sky that stretches out above her in its great blue expanses, in its great blue spaces crisscrossed by birdsong and the faraway droning of airplanes seeming to drift in their myriad purposeful directions, towards destinations that she can’t even imagine -- not even when those destinations are places that she has actually been to before, and now it’s so strange to think that she’d never really actually understood what “settling down” meant until she was well into her twenties.

That was what happened when your family had to keep moving from place to place, always sort of secretly on the run although there were no warrants out for their arrest, no orders that threw them from one place to another at random times -- nothing so official as that, but the very nature of what her mother did, and how her father supported her mother, meant that Jyn had never really known what it was like to call one specific place “home”, for any extended period of time.

London and Paris and Moscow and Budapest. Barcelona and Rabat and Mombasa and Mumbai. A cramped cold-water flat in Glasgow, and then a sprawling hotel suite with too many carpets underfoot in Prague, and then a cottage made of stone and huge bundles of thatching on one of the northernmost islands of the Philippines, and the only constants in her life were her mother and her father and a blanket checked in red and white. 

Even now, there’s a ragged piece of that blanket tucked away into her battered bag, carefully folded away to hide the fraying edges and dropped into an interior pocket. 

Jyn rubs at the sleep that gnaws and blurs insistently around the edges of her vision, and still needs to hide her yawn in the palm of her hand -- and the jolting motion of the bus as it navigates the broken and potholed road should have kept her awake if irritable, but it doesn’t. She’s been this way too many times, she’s memorized all the traffic signs and all the bus stops, and the familiarity can only lull her, lure her into drowsiness, almost to the point of missing the corner where she has to get off --

Her shoes land on the pavement again, and the smells of crumbling leaves and the remains of someone’s mulch, and she jams her chapped hands into her pockets. Her left pinky finger slips into a hole and -- she really has to remember to mend that hole before she winds up losing her change, or worse, her keys -- 

Forward and again, step by step, turning off the sidewalk at last onto well-known maroon-and-beige tiles and the fading graceful curlicues tracing vine-shapes and four-petaled flowers. Up four flights of steps.

She fumbles her way into apartment 242 and -- there’s no one else in there, nothing but the walls to echo her long slow fatigued breaths, and -- wait, there’s a red light blinking at her from one of the little tables. Ancient technology, now: the blocky black shape of an answering machine, and the red light means she’s got messages. 

Jyn throws her bag at one of the armchairs. Hobbles over to the answering machine. Even her fingertip seems too heavy to move, but she manages to hit the Play button on the black box.

_Stardust._

She can’t help but smile, and whisper: “Mama.”

_You don’t have to call me or anything when you get this message. Nothing to worry about on your end; I have just found myself with a spare half-hour in this airport, and I don’t feel like picking up a book, and also it’s been ages since I last talked to you. All is well; I will be meeting with a few of my old comrades in Singapore, and they have promised to billet me somewhere I don’t have to listen to the traffic tearing past outside my window. I have also been promised roast duck, so I look forward to that. I miss you, my Stardust; if you can wait another two months, I might be able to steal at least two weeks to spend with you at your home. But don’t think about going on leave, all right? I love you._

On to the next message, which begins with a quiet droning noise that fades away into: 

_It’s me, it’s Papa. I’m traveling to meet your mother wherever it is she might be headed to, at least after she’s done with her business in Singapore. The writing is going well. I did spend a sleepless night trying to think of a word that I could use to describe a woman who was surly and strong and also kind. Do you think you could help me out with that? Otherwise, there is no need for you to worry. I will be sending you some of the candy that I’ve been trying here in Kyoto. I know you need to keep up your sugar levels when you’re going on your rounds. And I remember that you don’t like grape-flavored anything. Papa loves you._

“I love you,” she says, to empty air. “Both of you.”

She has no idea what to do about the word that her father is looking for -- she’s too winded, she’s too tired, and all she can do is fall into one of the sagging loveseats. 

A blanket crumpled into a heap next to her. She shucks her white coat and wraps the purple-and-gray around her, the seams rough and clumsy as she traces them. Can’t help but smile and worry at the same time, because the blanket smells like sea salt and softwood smoke, like dried thyme and like powdered sugar.

Clearly someone’s been breaking into her stash of sweets.

In her mind she can hear the voices of her parents, reassuring and faraway; and she can also hear absent-minded humming, a low fitful mutter that moves fluidly between several varieties of Spanish.

She slumps gratefully into the pillow, which is cool beneath her cheek. Dented and hollowed material, and it doesn’t fit her exactly, which is as it should be. 

Breath by tired breath she feels herself sliding towards sleep -- and every time she jerks herself back into waking, because maybe she shouldn’t be sleeping on this couch, maybe she should be sleeping in the bed, and maybe she should be making her way toward that bed -- but she’s so comfortable right now, and the loveseat and the pillows are now warm and the rest of her is now so heavy -- 

Keys in the lock, and the scratch that means the door is about to open.

Some part of Jyn wants to laugh when she sees the man who comes in, because there are long lines of ink on his face and he must have caught himself when he was pulling his pen from his ear, and not just once this time either.

Mostly she just wants to smile at him, and there is a little girl somewhere inside her who holds out her arms to be -- what? Picked up? Embraced? 

Soft smile, dark stubble, hair growing out into straggling lengths, but the man who walks over to her has a crisp clean pale-green shirt on. Pens sticking out of his pockets; she can see his favorite, the many-times-polished silver fountain pen, as it gleams out at her. 

“Jyn,” Cassian says, gently.

She musters up the energy to smile at him, but even she knows it comes out lopsided and maybe a little bit pained, as well.

He must be on his knees if he’s now close enough for her to feel the warmth that radiates from him. “I have to confess I wasn’t expecting you back until tomorrow.”

She shakes her head into the pillow. “My relief arrived.”

“Malbus?” he asks. “That was uncommonly kind of him.”

The angles of his accent have softened in the four years and change since their first meeting. She reaches out now to trace the curve of his mouth. The shape of the words that he says. “And your shoulder?”

“Still hurts. I’ll live,” she manages to answer.

“They told you to sleep.”

She nods, and then shakes her head. “Don’t wanna get up.”

“I don’t want you sleeping here, mostly because you won’t have enough space, and you’ll wind up putting too much pressure on your shoulder.”

“No space for you here, either,” she says, mournfully. “But I think the cushions are trying to swallow me.”

He laughs, and for all that it’s a quiet sound, it seems to ring in the air all around her, seems to fill all the spaces between them with the unmistakable presence of his pulse and his breathing, which is just further proof for her that he’s alive and he’s actually there with her.

“That’s why I try not to sit there any more,” Cassian says.

She can see his arms winding around her, slow and gentle and sure; she can feel the strength of him, lifting her and supporting her. 

She hisses when her right shoulder twinges angrily at her -- but she presses a kiss to the nearest bit of Cassian that she can reach, which is now the side of his throat, and she steps away to stand on her own two feet, though she wobbles with every breath. “Bed?” she asks.

“Bed for you,” he agrees. “I will be right with you -- I just need to put the food away.”

“I should be hungry,” she says.

“You will be. And I will be. But right now, you need to sleep, all right?”

“All right.”

She’s halfway to the bed when she says, “My family’s coming here soon.”

His voice drifts toward her from the direction of the kitchen. “Oh? Is Lyra all right? Is Galen?”

“They said they were. Two months, I think was what they said.”

“I’ll have to remember to buy ingredients,” is Cassian’s response. “I can make them some proper menudo, I don’t know, I hope I can find some good tripe -- ”

She goes through the motions of getting undressed and climbing into bed, of getting comfortable, and she can’t close her eyes now, not and miss Cassian as he settles in beside her. Her mobile phone is in his hand. “Alarm,” she mumbles. “I mean, I don’t need it right now.”

“Good,” he says, and that’s when he leans in to kiss her, and she trembles against his touch because now she feels safe.

Even as he gathers her close, she knows he’s trying to be mindful of her aches, and in return she takes his right hand and begins to massage the palm and the base of it, kneading firm circles into his ink-stained skin.

“Thank you.”

She smiles, and kisses that warm spot between his mouth and his cheek, and closes her eyes.


	2. day two: comfort

Jyn ties off the last sutures with swift and tight knots, and swabs off the last of the blood herself, and only then does she look up to check on her patient’s vital signs -- all of which are now looking pretty stable, after the earlier scare.

She bites her lip, nods, pulls her hands away. “No signs of cardiac arrest,” she announces quietly, and she can hear the relief in the sighs that fill the operating room. She nods at the rest of the team. “Five minutes,” she says, “we’ll wait her out and see if she’ll be okay to move.”

“Yes, Doctor,” the woman next to her says.

“Pulse is normal. Blood pressure coming up a little,” the man putting the surgical instruments away announces. “I think she’s starting to relax, if the breathing is any indication.”

The monitors flutter with green lights and green numbers, and Jyn nods when the timer on one of the smaller screens flickers down towards zeroes. “All right. Recovery room, and everyone scrub out. Well done.”

Murmurs all around her.

She rotates her right shoulder, slow and firm and deliberate, as she shoots her gloves and throws them into the nearest appropriate garbage receptacle, clearly labeled. The paper mask and the cap she’d worn over her hair follow quickly. There is blood on the sleeves of her scrubs, and she just sighs and shakes her head. It’s not as much as she had expected, so she’ll have to take it as a victory.

The nurses and other personnel stream past, chattering about the details of the procedure, and Jyn catches a comment or two about steady hands before she tunes them all out. 

The smell of iodine clings stubbornly to her skin even as she rinses all the clinging suds away.

She stops at her locker to find the baby wipes, and she sighs in quiet relief as she mops the sweat away from her face.

There’s no comfort to be found in doing the paperwork after an operation, but at least she can report that everything went fine. The idea of wading through post-op complications or infections is always present in the back of her mind, and she appends several comments to the patient’s chart.

After a moment, she laughs quietly, and she’s glad there’s no one else in her office right now, because she’s watching herself write and she thinks she might be consciously or unconsciously trying to copy the way Cassian holds on to his pen, the way he pulls that pen across the paper, its broad nib whispering smoothly over the tissue-thin surface.

Last she’d seen him, his hands had been stained with green. 

So much for thinking he’d be sticking to the teal-blue ink.

Her signature on the last three pages’ worth of forms, drying in crabbed loops, means that she’s finished with this particular rotation -- but she’s evolved a routine, over the years of working at this particular hospital, and she likes to put in an extra hour or two at A&E, whenever she can. Sorting and re-sorting the patients for triage is a necessary thing, is a thing that might save more lives, and she wants to do everything that she can in order to save lives.

Or at least that was how she always saw the oath she’d sworn. The pin she keeps in a plain box on her desk is a reminder of that promise -- lightweight metal, familiar form, but maybe the tendency to take oaths a little too seriously runs in her family. Her mother was two years past retirement age, after all, and yet where was she but caught up in all manner of unofficial tasks and responsibilities.

She spares an amused thought for her father, cheerfully moving around the world in her mother’s wake.

The two of them holding on to the many, many vows they’d sworn.

In the here and now, in the muffled bustle of A&E: grass-stains all over the knees and shirt of the little boy whose broken leg she methodically assesses, and she passes him an extra lollipop when he heroically endures the splint and the lightweight cast. “I’m going to play for England when I grow up,” he says, all gap-toothed overweening pride.

“And what about the Premier League?” she asks, teasingly.

“My mum says there’s more money to be made if I don’t play here,” he says with a confused pout.

Jyn laughs. “I have a friend who roots for every team, except Real Madrid.”

“But Cristiano Ronaldo.”

She shrugs, in a friendly way. “He likes Fàbregas better.”

That gets her a considering frown. 

She ruffles his hair, and wishes him luck, and as she turns away from him a movement at the nurses’ station catches her eye: scrubs straining at the shoulder seams, Baze Malbus lifting a large hand to her.

“Evening,” Jyn says as she passes over the little boy’s updated chart.

“And to you,” Malbus says in reply. “Putting in your extra hours, then.”

She nods.

“Come.”

“You look worn out,” she ventures, when they’re alone in the elevator. “Everything all right at home?”

“Home is very comfortable, thank you. Chirrut wants to see you and your young man for dinner soon.”

She perks up, a little, at the mention of the more senior surgeon’s husband. “What does he want to try now?”

“Meze.”

“That sounds good,” and she remembers the taste of fiery hot peppers lingering on her teeth, cooled by the creamy thickness of cheese, of yogurt, of hummus. 

That gets her the ghost of a smile, and then the elevator stops and they’re standing on one of the maternity floors.

She smiles, wistful, as she passes a large window into a dimmed room. One row of cribs, each in its own curtained alcove. Some of the babies in their cribs are wearing different kinds of monitors. As she passes, a cry rises from one of those children, and that peevish sound is only partly muffled by the glass. 

She leans on a wall as Malbus checks in on that child, and on a more fragile newborn in its incubator.

There are fewer lines in his face, she thinks, and all he did was look over all those sleeping and not-sleeping children.

Finally she steps into his office, and he closes the door behind her.

“Have you given any thought to my offer?” he asks as he settles behind his desk.

She shrugs. “It’s -- something that another doctor might greatly profit from, I think.”

“I offered it to you specifically.”

“I know. And we are still talking about it.”

“Cassian told me he’d be happy to follow you to China.”

She laughs, then. “And the two of you have been talking behind my back. Or you’re using me as leverage of some kind, so you can also move there.”

“Chirrut was born there.”

She nods. “I understand it’s important for you to go with him when he goes home. But me -- I like it here.”

Malbus nods, after a moment. “Yes, you do. Here you have found some kind of comfort.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” she says. “I spent seven months in Shanghai. I liked it then and I hear a lot of good things about it now. But uprooting again -- that’s hard work. I’ve done it too many times. I want to spend years in a place -- and he’s gotten comfortable here, too.”

“Except for summers.”

“That’s something we both do,” Jyn laughs. “I might be able to convince him to go to Barcelona this year.”

“And your hopes?”

She shoots him a sharp smile. “Chirrut talks too much.”

“Yes.” Malbus smiles back.

She looks at her left hand as she thinks of a response: and it’s not the first time she’s allowed herself to entertain even a shadow of a hope of a weight on that left hand. Some doctors would keep their rings on for all but the most intricate and intimate of surgeries; others would transfer their rings to chains worn around their necks; others would simply take them off for the duration of the shift or rotation, and then put them on once they were out of the hospital.

There were some who didn’t even bother to wear rings at all, as she understands it.

As if he’s reading her mind, Malbus lifts his left hand from the desk.

Jyn squints at the weathered plain-metal band on his ring finger. “I never knew how to ask how long you’d been together.”

“Your young man asked immediately,” and Malbus huffs out a short laugh. “We met at university. I will turn fifty-four this year. Do the math.”

She shakes her head in wonder. “My parents haven’t even known each other that long.”

“But they are happy together?”

She nods. “He left his job to support her, basically. And he had tenure and everything, in America. He walked away because she thought she wasn’t done with saving the world, or at least looking after Her Majesty’s Government. He always says he’s happier now, and she’s always been happy with him and with her work.”

“Comfort,” Malbus says, after another moment.

A long and friendly silence stretches between them.

“I will -- think about it,” Jyn says, when she gets up to leave.

Malbus nods, and turns his chair away.

She wraps Cassian in a blanket and in her arms when she gets back to the apartment, and he doesn’t complain despite the fact that he’s standing over the stove, that his hands are now pinned somewhat awkwardly in place. “Hello to you too,” he says.

She can hear the laughter in his words, and lets herself bask in it and in him.


	3. day three: undercover

She scratches at the stiffly starched collar of her shirt for the fifth time in the last few minutes, and shifts from foot to foot, and doesn’t let go of Cassian’s hand.

“Starting to think the dressing up was a bad idea,” she hears him say, and she tilts her head to rest against his shoulder.

He is very, very comfortable in his immaculate navy suit, with the white shirt pinstriped in a very sober dark purple. Tiny owls in the pattern on his tie, black against deep gray. Even his shoes are shined to a mirror finish.

On the other hand, Jyn can’t stand to look at herself, not even in the blurred reflections cast by the cracked and crazed windows on the bus -- not when she doesn’t feel happy at all in her lace cuffs, her stylishly too-long suit jacket, her prim skirt and heels.

These are some of her favorite clothes, and that’s the problem, because she’s put them on specifically for today and she still feels nervous -- as nervous as she’d been when faced with her first live patient on that first actual operating table.

Still, she clings to Cassian’s hand with grim determination. “You asked me to be here, and I’m here.”

“And you would bolt, if you thought you had a chance.”

“Taking you far away with me.” She’d fiddle with her heavy earrings if she had both hands free. “I feel like I’m going undercover. Like I’m in disguise.”

“I like you better in your actual uniform,” he says, and the kiss he brushes against her temple calms her down, if only a little. “But -- scrubs look a little out of place at a formal tea.”

“I know.”

“And after all that time you spent teaching me how to stick my little finger out.”

“We never did,” and Jyn can laugh, now, and that’s a relief.

“I promised you a proper dinner anyway.” Sparks of affection and mischief in his eyes.

“I’ll collect.”

And impulsively, she straightens his tie. Brushes a few stray strands of his hair back into place behind his ears. There’s something appealing in the contrast of his stubble and his suit, she thinks, and she squeezes his hand and pulls her shoulders back. Feels him do the same. 

Some of the literature professors blink at her in surprise when Cassian introduces her -- and one, a serene-faced woman with red and gray hair and sharp eyes, goes so far as to say, “Give my regards to your father and mother, Doctor Erso.”

“I will, Professor Mothma,” she says, after a too-long moment of fumbling for that name.

“I had the pleasure of working with your mother, once -- she and Professor Breha Organa and I had a few good opinions to trade among ourselves. I hope that they are doing well.”

“Last I heard she was going to Switzerland, or at least she was leaving Singapore to go to Switzerland,” she says. “And Papa will follow her as soon as he can.”

“I should write to them, perhaps,” the professor says, and then she inclines her head in a stately nod, and is whisked away to one of the other tables.

“She’s really nice when she’s not required to be formal,” Cassian says, when they find a relatively quiet corner. “She’s got this thing she does every end of term, where she gives a really thoughtful gift to the students at the top of her classes. Doesn’t matter what you’re interested in. Last year, I heard she gave out fishing gear, three sets of _The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ , and I think a really expensive fountain pen?” 

“You wanted the fountain pen,” she teases.

“Of course I did,” he laughs. “Those pens are now very, very difficult to find. If only I had been her student.”

“Instead you’re her colleague.”

He grins some more. “Maybe I’ll ask her to start a new tradition -- among the faculty.”

There are speeches, and the unexpected pleasure of delicately sugared fresh strawberries, and she’s not the only one to sneak some of the offered bonbons into her purse or pockets. 

She’s pouring herself another cup of tea when several things happen at once: a crash, a cry, and only the briefest instant of horrified silence before -- “Someone call A&E!”

She’s on her feet and Cassian is beside her, pale with apprehension -- somehow she shoulders her way past all the china and all the elegant suits, and she’s sinking to her (bare) knees next to a silver-haired woman.

Fluttering eyelashes, and a hand clenched into a fist at her jaw. The woman’s dress is soaked with sweat. 

“Call 999,” she says, to Cassian. “Tell them you want the ambulance service.”

“On it,” and she tunes him out as he dials, as he starts speaking, probably to an operator.

“Hello,” she says, instead, to her patient. “I’m Jyn Erso. I’m a doctor.”

No reply: just the woman’s eyes rolling in fright and panic.

She works to keep her voice even but carrying: “Can anyone tell me about this woman’s medical history?”

The voice that answers is already familiar, as is the red hair. “My colleague has been on maintenance medication for her heart for some time now.”

“Other conditions?”

“None that I know of,” is Professor Mothma’s reply.

Pulse, breathing rate, changes in the color of the patient’s skin -- she’s alone, and there are too many people watching her. She goes through the checklists in her mind; she’s not fazed when the woman beneath her hands suddenly starts choking. The people around her step away from the possibility of vomit. Jyn ignores them all -- except for when Cassian points his phone in her direction. 

“Operator,” she says. “I’m Doctor Jyn Erso. Stand by for patient details.”

“Standing by,” says the voice on the line.

“You’re going to be all right,” Jyn murmurs to the woman, over and over -- and soon the women from the ambulance service take up the words. 

“What’s the name of her GP?” one of the newcomers asks.

Again, it’s Professor Mothma who answers: “Ackbar, Doctor Ackbar.”

“Thank you,” the woman says, and then to Jyn: “Good thing you were here.”

Jyn nods, once. “I don’t have my instruments or I would be able to give you more data.”

“We can get her stabilized long enough to get to A&E. To call her GP in.”

“All right.”

She steps away. 

“Come on,” Cassian says.

In the wake of the adrenaline rush is free-fall, like a lurch in her belly, and instead of wishing she could sit with him for a moment after one operation or emergency or another, he’s already right there with her, steadying her hands around an entirely different cup of tea.

His phone chimes again, and he looks at it -- then passes it to her.

The text message is from Professor Mothma. _I will keep you informed if there are any changes in her condition. Thank you for your prompt action._

“I’m always proud of you,” Cassian murmurs, after a moment. “And today, I am really really glad you’re here.”

“And I you,” she says, and keeps holding his hand.


	4. day four: nerve

The ungodly shriek of an alarm tumbles her to her feet, blinking and breathless, and it takes her a very long moment to remember that -- actually it’s not an alarm at all.

Sirens pulling in, loud enough to wake the dead, and she’s halfway out the door when she catches a glimpse of one of the large clocks in the corridors. 

Her shift is over.

But there were several sets of sirens and they might need extra hands, and she’s rushing out of her office before she can even finish the thought.

Lorry accident, she hates those, especially when they collide with other vehicles, and she’s wrist-deep in one of the stricken drivers when she looks up and meets Malbus’s eyes.

He is grim-faced and also busy.

“Finish with this one,” he says, “then you may go. We have this in hand.”

She nods, and finishes her assessment of the man’s injuries -- a catalogue of broken bones and far too much broken glass, what happened to whatever the man had been driving? -- and then she’s stepping out of the way of the fourth stretcher, she’s watching the rest of the A&E staff get to work.

Leaving her looking on.

Relief and apprehension warring, jolting, up and down her nerves.

She has a duty to help -- and she also has a duty to take care of herself.

Reluctantly she walks back to her office.

She doesn’t think about changing out of her clothes: just throws a jacket on over her scrubs, just picks up her backpack, and she’s out the door. 

No one looks at her when she gets on the bus, nor at the stains on her scrubs.

The apartment is filled with the smells of something roasting.

Cassian is nowhere in sight, not even when she checks the extra room that they use for storage.

It had been her bedroom, originally, when they’d agreed to share the rett and all of the other expenses -- but that was before they got into this relationship that they now have. Now she keeps her books and a few emergency supplies in there, next to the accumulated layers of his diplomatic work.

There’s a neatly carved chicken inside the oven, the pan juices still bubbling slightly -- and as mouthwatering as the smell might be, she doesn’t really have an appetite, not when she’s so tired and so alone.

She strips off, leaden and mechanical. Hot water pouring down her face, onto her shoulders, dripping to the tiles and flowing away.

The world blurs out, and there is something hot on her cheeks, something salty at the corners of her mouth, and it’s only when she sniffles, loud in the confined space, that she realizes that she’s been crying.

“Jyn,” says a voice that she almost, almost recognizes.

She turns, slowly, and all she can see beyond the translucent shower curtain is a familiar shape in the world -- maybe almost as familiar as the shape of her face in the now fogged-over mirror, except that this other shape is moving like she isn’t moving.

Hands, gently closing around hers. Leading her out of the bath. Wrapping her in a towel. 

Here is a bed. It is big and it sags in the middle, and there are bits of dust and cobwebs clinging to some of the crevices in the headboard. Gray-striped duvet and pale yellow pillows. 

She thinks she murmurs something when she’s guided into the bed.

Warmth on her forehead, a brief pressure, brushes against the corners of her eyes.

She hiccups, once, and falls asleep between one breath and another.

And she wakes up some time later to the rustle of paper very close to her ear.

To Cassian’s voice, reading quietly, smoothly, though the names were unusual: something very much like _Tisarwat_ , she thought. His mouth forming different shapes by the light of the dimmed lamp on his side of the bed.

She coughs around the lump that had been left in her throat by her crying.

“Awake?” Cassian mutters, and he turns another page. 

“I think.”

“I got you water.”

“Thank you,” Jyn says, and she forces herself to drink slowly. A slight chill on the back of her neck from her still-damp hair. 

Beside her, in the bed, Cassian is wearing those little squared-off reading spectacles and not much of anything else, aside from his boxer-briefs.

“Thank you,” she says again, much less parched this time.

“Feel better?”

“Let’s just say, I don’t want to think about the hospital for now.”

“It’s one of those days, then.”

She nods, and snuggles in against him. His skin is warm. “Being a physician is a good thing.”

“Except when it runs you ragged.”

She nods. “Maybe that’s why Malbus watches me so closely.”

He coughs, jolting a little within the circle of her arms. “We worry for you, you know. Me and him and Chirrut.”

She doesn’t say _thank you_ or anything of the sort: only pulls away so she can sit up. So she can put a finger on the pages of his book, and tilt her head in his direction. “Do you mind?”

She watches the expressions crossing his face, and shoots him a smile -- and it’s good to see his brows unfurl from their almost-frown. He slots a scrap of paper into the book to mark his place, and puts it and his glasses away. 

His fingers, again, brushing over her cheeks, her temples. The quiet hum of him, as he follows those paths with soft kisses. 

She holds on to him, very gently, by one shoulder and the back of his head. Leans forward, gently, to kiss him on the mouth. His sigh breaks over her like a wave, sweetly coaxing; and she presses her advantage, leans forward, until she can feel him falling gently and slowly back to the pillows, and she doesn’t stop kissing him. Can’t get enough of the taste of him, or the way he whines in the back of his throat when she maneuvers his underwear off.

His voice almost breaks on her name, as his hands press in at her hip and her waist. 

“We have time,” she murmurs against him. She is facing him, holding him, side by side and facing each other, scant spare inches of space between their bodies and then one of them, both of them, are moving. They are pressed full-length against each other, and she can feel that cramp in her middle that thrills to the heat of his touch. His kiss, insistent and needy, and she wants to give, wants to take -- hears herself keen, when his mouth leaves hers.

He trails down, down, nipping gently at her throat and then licking, darting-quick, as if to ease the pain -- but there’s no pain in it for her, and no instinct to flinch away, either. She can’t pull away now, not when he’s scattering kisses over her skin, over her collar bones and her shoulder, his mouth opening and closing in secret silent words in languages she’s only maybe heard and never comprehended, secret silent promises.

The vague idea of leaning over him shivers away -- instead, here he is, looking down at her, and maybe she says his name or maybe she says something else -- maybe she asks him for something that she can’t even name, the words fleeing her, as he licks teasingly at the corner of her mouth and then seals himself to her in a powerful kiss.

She’s breathless beneath him, she’s overpowered and willingly so.

She chokes out his name, arching up and trembling, when he licks a slow circle around her nipple, tight and hot and hard and then he’s suckling -- she thinks she calls his name, she feels her hands clench, one on the bed and one just above his hair -- her own nails digging into her skin, bright flaring pinpoint sensation on top of what he’s doing to her with his mouth -- 

His hands holding her down, gently, just at her waist, thumbs rubbing soothing circles -- dizzying heat flaring up in her, and maybe she means to coax him on, or tell him to slow down, or something, but her thoughts fracture away and her words are stolen -- all she can do is hold on and feel, just feel him -- 

He moves to her other breast and this time he bites very very gently at her, and she does find the breath to swear because he’s such a tease, he’s so good to her -- 

Is he laughing against her skin? She chokes out his name, and tries to draw the breath she needs -- his stubble scraping against her, leaving her shivering -- 

Lower still. She can’t help but sob with relief when he carefully pushes her knees apart. Teasing licks and kisses from knee to hip and back again. He hasn’t even touched the most secret places of her and she’s already teetering towards the edge, desperate and keening, and then he’s planting one of her feet flat on the bed and she’s bared to him completely -- she would blush if she could only think past the part where she’s nothing but her nerves and the overwhelming sensation of feeling him breathe onto her. Pleading sounds falling from her lips. 

His tongue on her, his fingers in her -- she’s falling apart with every moment --

“Fuck,” she hears Cassian say, and then the world frays and falls away.

And again there is a warmth at her side that she can’t help but reach out to: she opens her eyes to Cassian, wild-eyed, smiling lopsided at her and his mouth is wet with -- with her.

“You,” she begins, and then she hauls him in close despite her boneless contented lassitude -- she clenches her fist in his hair, kisses him and kisses him.

With the other hand she takes his cock in a gentle grip. He is hard and hot and damp at the tip already. She tears away from the kiss long enough to gasp against his skin: “I want this -- ”

“Jyn,” is all the response she gets, at least all the spoken response she gets -- and she blinks at him, clumsy but quick as he gets into position -- she plants her foot in the small of his back and pushes him closer -- the tip of him nudging the entrance of her, and she meets his eyes steady and sure and wanting as he enters her, as he sinks into her.

He is shaking where he’s leaning his forehead against her shoulder.

“Not going to break,” she gasps.

He says her name again -- pulls almost all the way out and then slams home again -- she growls encouragement and holds on to him, to the thrust and roll of his hips falling out of control as he chokes on her name -- 

He comes, and that sets her off again, the pure need that she can hear in him strangling his name on her lips -- 

And after, he curls protectively into her side, his pulse slowing and quieting against her fingertips.


	5. day five: home

Ink stains on his fingertips, a paper cut across his right palm, holes in his sleeveless shirt, files seemingly exploded all around him on the floor, three bottles of beer lying on their sides next to a cardboard box.

This is what she sees when she gets through the door.

She also sees and hears Cassian: who is scribbling furiously in one of his battered notebooks, who is talking to himself in at least two languages that she knows of.

And this is not even the first time she’s seen him get lost in his work like this -- she’s seen him like this so often that she no longer checks the laugh rising to her lips, the purely strange warmth that lodges beneath her heart, the instinct to sit down next to him and listen as he talks his way through the logic and the arguments of whatever it is that he needs to write down now, whatever it is that he needs to finish now.

Today, though, today is a little different, because it’s been several hours since her previous shift ended and she will soon need to go back to the hospital for her next shift, and there is a weight in her pocket that wasn’t there when she left for work: a weight in her pocket that consists of a velvet pouch and two plain domed rings in black titanium. The rings are nearly identical to each other except for their respective sizes: one fits her. The other is the same size as one of the plain silver rings that Cassian had used to wear, back before he’d gone full-time into his government work.

She doesn’t need to put her fingertips to her wrist to know that her heart is hammering double-time, maybe even triple-time. 

There is nothing impulsive about purchasing rings like these.

But she almost surprises herself when she drops her bag in the foyer, when she strides right through Cassian’s papers, when she greets his mild expression with a smile.

When she drops to one knee beside him and produces her velvet pouch from her pocket.

“Jyn,” Cassian begins, and she watches him close his mouth, open it again, close it again.

He doesn’t look like he might want to run away.

His hand is actually on the knee on which she’s propped up the pouch and the rings within it.

“If I had known,” he begins again. “If I had known, maybe I would have cleaned up? Been properly dressed? Made you a really special meal?”

“And you cook for me almost every day, and you never mind when I cook and it’s -- simple things, ordinary things,” she says, and she takes his hand in both of her own. 

Takes a deep breath. “That’s -- that’s the whole thing, really. I come back here and it’s a home. You’ve made it a home. Your papers, your books, your pens -- sometimes I want to ask you to give me lessons in using your pens, in writing with all those colors of ink that you collect.”

The lines of his smile deepen, and he says her name.

“Not yet done,” Jyn says, as gently as she can. “I -- I had a lot of things to say. You don’t mind when I tell you to clear out because I’m going to clean the house. You put my broken coffee mug back together after I told you I had inherited it from my mother. You made sure you’d remember the important dates in my life -- I mean, I remember them, I want to remember them, and then you made a point of doing the same thing because you felt like it. You let me cry when I’m feeling like shite, without trying to fix whatever’s making me cry. I don’t know why or how I got so lucky, finding you, when you don’t understand all of the things that I do at the hospital but you get me.”

“That’s not always so easy,” she hears him say, and she laughs and nods along with him.

“No, no it’s not. I don’t even understand myself sometimes.”

“But Jyn. Wait.” He holds his hand up. “Is it my turn to talk?”

She laughs some more, and feels the prick of tears in the corners of her eyes, and nods again.

“I ask myself that same question every day. I must have done something good that I was able to find you, but I can’t think what it might be. You tell me what you need, you ask me for things that you want, and they are all things that I just want to do even if they make very little sense to me. You sometimes are very confusing to me, but I never ever think about walking away because -- this,” and he moves the hand that she’s still holding on to. “I don’t ever want to let go of you -- well, unless you decide you’re tired of me.”

“Never. _Never_ ,” Jyn says. “I mean -- that’s why I bought these.”

She finally extricates herself from him, but not without a pang of regret that she immediately soothes by kissing the tip of his nose, and the corner of his left eye. 

Her fingers shake, a little, as she undoes the knot holding the velvet pouch shut. As she turns it over and lets the two rings fall into her free hand.

“Black rings,” Cassian says, with wonder.

“Chirrut’s idea,” she says. “He didn’t think you’d be happy wearing something workaday, his words not mine.”

And now this is the moment.

So she meets his eyes and holds out the ring in his size. “Marry me, Cassian. Be with me always. We’ll -- we’ll keep working on making this place home. We’ll wake up together and we’ll hold each other when we sleep. We’ll laugh and cry and make fun of each other. We’ll get hideously weeping drunk at stupid stereotypical romance comedies. We’ll -- we’ll be together, we’ll be home together.”

She watches the tears fall from his eyes, onto his shirt.

She wonders about how long she has to hold her breath -- 

He takes her hand that is holding up the ring between them, and presses a kiss to her skin, and to the black metal -- and says, “Yes, Jyn, yes, I’ll marry you. But you know. We don’t need to work on home.”

“We don’t?”

“You already are my home.”

She says his name, laughing and weeping all at once, and she places the black ring on his hand.

Watches as he takes the other ring, the ring that’s been made in her size, and places it very gently on her finger.

And it’s a relief to fall into his arms, even when they topple over and he lands on his back among his files, even as she hiccups her tears and her laughter into his chest.

When he asks her to take a picture of the rings on their left hands, she bites her lip and does. “For your friends?”

“I want to tell the whole world that you asked me to marry you,” he says. “I want to tell the whole world that I said yes.”

And, after a moment, he asks, “I heard what you said about Chirrut’s ideas. But tell me. You got these rings so you can wear yours even when you’re working -- right?”

“This is why I asked you to marry me,” she half-chokes. “Because you ask questions like that even when I’ve made it pretty clear that you don’t have to. And yes, I followed Malbus’s example -- and I cleared it with my bosses, too.”

“Good to know,” he says, and kisses her cheek.

And she would turn to kiss him back except for the yawn that interrupts her, that nearly makes her fall onto her back.

Cassian laughs, not at all unkindly. “You’re already sleep-deprived. You need to go to bed.”

“You can’t come with me, can you,” and she pouts at him.

He laughs some more. “I needed to finish this thing yesterday, I just kept losing my train of thought.”

“Sorry to keep distracting you,” she mutters into his collar bone.

“Never apologize for that. Just -- go to sleep, and as soon as we’re both done with what we need to do -- ” He kisses her right on the mouth, then, the kind of kiss that makes her toes curl in her shoes. “As soon as we’re off, we’re doing something reckless.”

She laughs, and kisses him one more time, and when she falls into bed she runs her thumb over the smooth weight of the ring on her left hand before dropping off.


	6. day six: hope

She steps lightly over the threshold into the apartment -- well, lightly, given that she’s wearing her usual heavy-soled boots, given that she’s bone-weary and thoroughly numb after another few nights of peering into the insides of one elderly patient after another, given that she’s running on caffeine fumes and the ghosts of cold limp sandwiches.

Other doctors get two weeks of paid time off after several years of active service. Other doctors can afford to take a two-week vacation. Other doctors don’t actually go on vacation; Jyn has heard of at least one other doctor in her department doing it, and that was for the entirety of the previous year.

(She likes to tell herself that she only saw Mara Jade as a rival for a couple of weeks. The truth, and Cassian knows this, is that she still measures herself against the other woman, if only because she wants to keep getting better, because she wants to keep saving lives.)

She steps through the rooms and they are empty of Cassian’s shadow or presence, empty of his papers and inks and pens. Even the briefcase that he normally keeps next to the closet is missing.

She lets herself smile, thinking of Cassian in his suit jacket and tie, thinking of him making a presentation, and gesturing his ideas and logic into neat order with the hand that is wearing a plain black ring.

Maybe she’s not too tired to cook, she thinks. Bread is simple and easy to make, and it goes well with the ever-growing collection of cheeses that they keep in a half-translucent crate in the bottom of the refrigerator. 

It would make for a good start to her holiday.

Good thing she’d been convinced to buy some muesli during the last run to the shops: she can use it to follow Nigella Lawson’s recipe for a quick loaf.

Perhaps the only objection she might have to this particular recipe would be the distinct lack of kneading -- but then again, even though she would really like to bash her way through her frustrations, she’s not sure her wrists or shoulders can take the punishment right now.

The oven is small and cantankerous and needs a little scrubbing: but it heats up in the right way and she doesn’t want to complain. It’s just a chore to find the right position for the loaf pan, somewhere near the middle so it can cook evenly; and somewhere near the top so there’s plenty of crust.

Cassian is a big fan of crusts on his bread, where she’s always been indifferent to them. 

She’s happy to do this for him.

The recipe calls for a long baking time -- an hour and forty-five minutes at the barest minimum -- and she slumps over a cup of tea as she waits, and wakes herself up when she knocks her forehead against the table, laughing ruefully between yawns.

She’s hunting through the cupboards for a rack on which to cool the finished loaf when her mobile phone rings -- it plays a tinny transposition of a passionate tango, the ringtone that she’s assigned to one single person in the world.

So she’s smiling when she picks up: “Hey.”

“Jyn,” Cassian says, hoarse and too quiet.

She goes up onto her toes. Feels adrenaline pulse down her worn-out arms and legs. “Wait,” she says to the phone -- and she doesn’t bother with being decent, only bothers with getting dressed quickly. With putting her just-discarded scrubs back on. There’s only enough time to tip the loaf pan back into the cooling oven. “Talk to me,” she says as she makes herself run out the door.

“I’m at the hospital -- your hospital -- the place where you work. My boss has had a heart attack. I -- I asked that he be brought here. Can you -- ”

“On my way.”

“Jyn, please.”

“I am on my way. I will meet you there.”

Cassian has been working with Davits Draven for a long time, and he has often spoken of the man as his mentor, and Jyn maybe finds him a little too exacting for her tastes -- but maybe the strange novels that Cassian reads at Draven’s suggestion give the lie to that opinion.

The horror and the pleading in Cassian’s voice make her blood run cold even when she’s not actively hearing him.

As she jitters her foot in the back of the black cab, she hits another speed-dial button on her phone, and takes a deep breath before speaking: “Dr Malbus?”

“This is Chirrut,” says the voice on the other end. “It’s an emergency, Dr Erso, isn’t it?”

“I hate to impose -- but I have to. Or rather Cassian has to. There’s been a heart attack. I haven’t seen the patient yet, I don’t have a clue as to his medical history. All I know is that the patient is about 73, no, he turned 74 a few months ago. We went to the birthday party.”

“What about Cassian?”

“Patient name Davits Draven -- Cassian’s boss,” she says.

A squelch on the line and then a familiar rasp: “On my way.”

“Sorry sorry,” Jyn says, to both of them.

“Don’t apologize.” Chirrut again. “And I know that you and Baze will do everything in your power to save this man’s life.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank us yet.”

She throws a bill at the cabbie without really thinking about whether she’s paying him the right amount -- she’s too focused on running back into the hospital, on making her way back to A&E, and she thinks she recognizes Malbus as he comes in through one of the other entrances.

Her eyes are all on Cassian. His arms wrapped around his own midsection. His hair long since fallen out of its tail. Fearful shadows bruising beneath his eyes. Two briefcases at his feet.

She drops to her knees next to him and picks up the bag that isn’t his.

“What are you doing,” she hears him ask, wooden.

“I need to see the patient’s medications, if he was taking any.”

“Cassian,” someone says, and she catches a glimpse of cloth and sturdy rubber stitched together: that would be Chirrut, then, walking more quickly with his white cane tucked beneath his arm and out of the way. “Cassian, come with me. Let the doctors work.”

She looks up, and catches Cassian’s eyes. 

She wonders what he sees in her, when he forces a small smile and makes himself walk next to Chirrut, walk away from her, walk in the direction of the waiting areas.

Once what she presumes is Draven’s briefcase is open, it only takes her a moment to spot the case in the smallest interior pocket. Clear plastic with colored tape reinforcing the hinges, bright orange for visibility’s sake: half-full, this one. She recognizes the shapes of several pills: beta-blockers, an iron supplement, and the gold-tinted soft caplets that are one of the usual vehicles for the administration of therapeutic fish oil. 

“Give those to the senior sister,” Malbus rumbles, and she propels herself to her feet and hurries after him. “Put on some clean clothes, and scrub in.”

“Yes sir.”

Stripped almost to his skin and hooked up to what seems like a dozen life-support devices, the man on the operating table is tall and well-built and imposing, which makes the unexpected pallor of his skin all the more shocking. She catches only a glimpse of the blue tint around his mouth, before it’s covered by the mask-like device that will deliver more oxygen to his lungs. 

She ties her hair back and allows one of the orderlies to cover her head with a sterile paper cap, before putting on a pair of dark blue gloves, rubbery and artificial against her own skin.

“Is it systolic or diastolic?” Malbus is saying as she takes her place opposite him.

“Diastolic. His specialist is standing by if we need to talk to him.” one of the nurse-practitioners says, the prelude to a series of notes on the patient’s condition.

Jyn nods, after, and meets Malbus’s eyes squarely. “If this is his first MI -- then there’s hope.”

“There is always hope,” is the firm reply. “But it’s up to us to make sure our patients live longer.”

How her hands remain steady as she and Malbus move from the angiogram to the angioplasty, she doesn’t know, though she feels the grinding enormous weight of her fatigue with every breath that she takes.

“Another bag,” she says, nodding to one of the others in the room.

“Just as a precaution,” she hears Malbus add. 

Hands moving unobtrusively near her, hanging a fresh flopping pouch of B+ blood from the gleaming metal arm positioned over the operating table.

One hour and fifty-one minutes later, she’s asked to step aside. 

But it’s only after Malbus mutters, “Good work, everyone,” that she’s able to take a deep and clean breath.

Two steps into the room where she’d normally scrub out -- and she drops heavily onto the nearest bench, and puts her head in her hands.

There’s no question that there will be so many more of these operations still in store for her.

This one just feels like she had the weight of the entire world on her shoulders for the entire duration.

The weight that settles next to her on the bench is composed of stark relief and equally stark fatigue.

“Thank you,” she says.

“And thank you for your steady hands.” Malbus heaves his own sigh, maybe as long and fraught as hers had been. 

“I’m supposed to be on holiday right now.”

“Yes. So go, without any worries.”

“And when I come back -- ”

“When you come back, I am going to sleep for a month.”

She finds it in herself to laugh.

And she’s still smiling, worn-out as she is, when she goes out to sit with Cassian and Chirrut.

Cassian doesn’t even ask her any questions: just puts his arms around her, and murmurs thanks into her hair. 

“He is important to you. I know that much,” she says, mostly into her knees where she’s leaning her forehead into them. “We did everything we could. And he’ll live.”

“Yes,” Cassian says. “Thanks to Dr Malbus. Thanks to you.”

Chirrut’s laughter beside her, or perhaps around her -- soft and delighted.


	7. day seven: future

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just wanted to say: if you've read this story this week -- THANK YOU.

She opens her eyes and almost nothing around her is familiar.

Soft sweet susurrus of the wind and of the waves, far too close, vibrating gently on her skin.

The faint sweet scents of fallen fruits and flowers.

Pleasantly raspy cloth against her knees, and blowing in against her bared midsection: her ankle sticking out of a laughably light blanket. Faint shadows dancing across the sheet of fine netting that is swaying next to her wrist.

She blinks at the gracefully carved bedframe that towers over her, and the lanterns hanging from the beams crossing the peaks of the ceiling, and the wooden shutters thrown open to admit the constantly gurgling sea breeze.

A quick breath next to her, a twitch of dark eyebrows and a mouth hanging faintly open, and she’s wrapping herself around Cassian, recognizing him at last, in this place that she’s never seen before.

A scent of smoky wood and burnt leaf lingers on his skin -- which is as bare to the wind as hers is -- and that’s how she remembers everything that’s brought them here.

The weary smiles on four dear faces.

A young man who held his hand palm-downward over her ring and Cassian’s, and his ease with different languages: he had recited the first chapter of the Qur’an in Arabic, and followed that up with several blessings in at least two different languages, including what she afterwards learned was Urdu.

Cassian wearing her long-cherished scrap of red-and-white blanket in the pocket of his best black suit, the faded colors still managing to clash with the dark green of his shirt.

Her dress in several mottled shades of purple and plum -- a plain modest column that was not quite what she’d had in mind to wear to her own wedding.

Chirrut and Baze: joyful smiles, and a flat wide wooden case in pale-colored wood. “Please, open that later,” Chirrut had said. “And with this we wish you a happy future, and a good life.”

Her mother’s face, creased and worn and well-loved, her smile radiating absolute joy: the more so when she’d pulled Cassian into an embrace, her tears damp on his shoulder, his tears falling into her hair.

Her father’s hands folding her fingers around a large envelope -- and in it, airplane tickets and a reservation in her name for a honeymoon suite.

Well, it’s less of a suite and more of a cottage; in fact, it’s the very cottage she’s occupying now, with Cassian’s arms wrapped around her, the two of them wrapped around each other, her dress and his suit -- their wedding finery -- discarded at the foot of the bed.

She’s a married woman now. 

She has been married to Cassian for a little over twenty-four hours.

Chirrut and Baze had been standing at Cassian’s back, as her parents had been standing with her.

The thought makes her laugh, softly, and press a lingering kiss to his shoulder.

He laughs back. “I know,” he says, after a moment, just as if he’s been reading her mind. “Thinking about yesterday? It’s a strange thing to me, too. The good kind of strange. The unexpected kind.”

“I’ve woken up next to you for the past four years, and it’s still new to me, every day,” she says.

“You snore when you’re exhausted.”

“You talk in your sleep, and I can never understand you.”

“I can’t understand you when you’re thinking out loud, either. And now I understand why your accent is so strange.”

She pinches him in the ribs, very gently. “No one’s ever managed to guess my father’s accent accurately.”

“I didn’t have any problems understanding him.”

“Okay.”

She sighs when he runs his fingers through her hair, and trails them down her arm. “Married.”

“Yes,” Cassian says. “You were thinking it all over, when I asked you to just -- jump into the whole thing with me.”

“I was only thinking that I wanted more time to find a proper dress,” she laughs. “I was -- I was pleased that you’d asked me to get married right then and there. That you waited for my parents to actually be here before you actually did it.”

“We’ll have to remember to send that guy something,” he says. “The guy who officiated. Bodhi Rook, his name was.”

“He looked so shocked when you told him you wanted something like a Las Vegas wedding.”

“Because we were not in Las Vegas.” Soft laughter. “And this isn’t a marriage that will be a flash in the pan.”

She nods. “It had better not be.”

“Yes, dear.”

She listens to the beat of his heart, to the soft thunder of the waves rolling onto the sand. 

Closes her eyes, and says, “Don’t laugh at me, please.”

“Jyn?”

She shakes her head. Doesn’t move, even as she feels him shift to look at her. “I just -- let me say this.”

He sounds a little fearful, and that makes her sad. “All right.”

“Your parents,” she murmurs. “You would have wanted them there. And they weren’t.”

“They weren’t.” He is gently resigned, now. “Or maybe they were. I can’t know.”

“If they had been there, I would have wanted to tell them that -- ” The words come out in a rush. “That the promises I made to you would be just as important as the, the Hippocratic Oath. The promise we make, people like me, when we’re starting out. I would have wanted them to understand that. So I’m telling you instead. I -- well -- you need to hear it. I should have told you. I was trying to tell you. But maybe I could have been clearer, I don’t know -- ”

And when he makes a soft startled sound, she looks up -- only to have all of her other words stolen away by her name on his lips, by the press of his mouth to hers.

“I love you,” Cassian whispers between kisses, sweet refrain, sweet litany. “I love you, Jyn. I love you. _Te amo mi corazón._ ”

“I can’t say it like you do,” she says. “It’s still true. I love you, Cassian. I love you.”

“I’d write it everywhere if I could.”

“Like a tattoo,” she says.

Her eyes fall on the paper bag that they’ve carried this far: the only other bit of baggage that they’ve been carrying around with them.

It’s hard to leave the warmth of Cassian; it’s easy to return to him, and when she does, she’s holding Chirrut and Baze’s gift.

She fits into Cassian’s lap, when he scrambles to sit up. 

His chin fits over her shoulder; his hands fit over and around hers. 

Together they open the case.

Soft smooth paper on top, nearly translucent, the whole stack no more than half an inch high. The sheets rustle when they are moved, and fit perfectly into the recess on top of the lid.

Inside, cushioned in a cloth that seems to shimmer in the scant light of the room: five brushes made of graceful mottled bamboo and pliant hair in several shades of brown. A black shape as long as Jyn’s finger, bearing a carving of what looks like a pair of long-feathered ducks swimming side by side. An elegant representation of a pond: the part with an engraving of a lily pad is shallow, while the rest of the shape is much deeper. And in its own compartment, a dragonfly in delicate white and blue.

She blinks because the gift makes no sense to her, except that it is beautiful and quite possibly extravagant.

And Cassian laughs, softly. “This whole thing -- it’s an essential part of the scholar’s life.” He points to the items as he names them: “Paper and brushes to be used with that inkstick, which you turn into something you paint or write with using that inkstone, and when you set your brush aside you put it on that dragonfly. These are the four treasures of the study.”

“Writing materials,” she murmurs. “For you.”

She feels him shake his head. “For us.”

As she lifts the dragonfly from its corner, she spots a piece of paper beneath it.

“Lamp,” Cassian says, and he lunges toward one of the switches mounted over the side table. 

The room fills with gold-hued light. 

Enough light to let her read the writing on the paper: 

_When two people are at one_   
_in their inmost hearts_   
_They shatter even the strength of iron_   
_or of bronze_   
_And when two people understand each other_   
_in their inmost hearts_   
_Their words are sweet and strong_   
_like the fragrance of orchids._

“Fu Xi,” Cassian adds, reading the attribution beneath. “From the I Ching.”

“That’s us,” Jyn says, after a moment spent wiping the tears from her eyes.

She raises his hand to her mouth. Presses kisses to his knuckles and to his palm. To his ring.

She shivers when he responds with a kiss to the back of her neck. When he takes her hand and holds it to his cheek, with the metal of her ring warming against him.

“That’s us,” he says.

“If I wore that poem on my skin,” she begins.

And he laughs with her. “Let’s think about that.”

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Rebelcaptain Appreciation Week, which is being hosted by [@therebelcaptainnetwork](https://therebelcaptainnetwork.tumblr.com/) and [@rebelcaptainprompts](http://rebelcaptainprompts.tumblr.com/) over on Tumblr. 
> 
> I am also on tumblr myself -- look me up [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)!


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